Smokers and Sleepers

Photographer Jerome Mallmann has captured images of New Yorkers in unguarded moments since the late 1960s. Images in this exhibition organized by the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art) show a dispossessed population, those driven or escaping to the streets of New York to indulge in the compulsion to smoke or the need to sleep. The works are the result of twenty years of photography, always with small cameras, fast film, and without a flash, in order to intrude as little as possible into subjects' lives. Candid and spontaneous, the photographs capture the complex rituals and terrifying realities of life on the streets of New York.
Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison